So rather than take down each and every undeservedly viral story that crosses our monitors each week, we’re rounding them all up in a quick, once-a-week Friday debunk of fake photos, misleading headlines and bad studies that you probably shouldn’t share over the weekend.
Ready? Here’s what was fake on the Internet this week:
1. Neither Axl Rose nor “the Dog Whisperer” are dead. Welp, this week was a double-whammy for death hoaxes: Both Axl Rose, the Guns N’ Roses frontman, and Cesar Millan, the fanatically beloved dog-trainer, suffered untimely ends this week, per two separate fake-news sites. Rose’s death was “reported” on MSNBC.website, which has no affiliation with MSNBC and exists solely to propagate highly convincing news hoaxes. To that end, it doesn’t even have a home page — its creators apparently just publish one-off, individual “articles” with the hope that readers won’t scrutinize them closely. (That strategy works — MSNBC.website is also the site that brought you the “news” of Macaulay Culkin’s death.)
The dog-whisperer hoax also came from a sneaky source: On Tuesday, the Spanish-language site UNAM Noticias posted a report that Millan had suffered a heart attack and died at Santa Clarita Hospital in California. UNAM Noticias openly admits that it’s not a real news site — “the site … is a satirical newspaper whose only purpose is entertainment,” a disclaimer reads — but it does so in Spanish. The Millan report, meanwhile, was written in English, which perhaps explains how it was shared some 45,000 times. (Like I said: very sneaky.)
Rose and Millan both took to social media to debunk the claims. “Reports of my pack leader’s untimely demise are greatly exaggerated,” reads a Facebook post “from” Millan’s dog. Rose, meanwhile, had this to say:
2. A Ferguson protester did not carry a sign reading “no mother should have to fear for her son’s life every time he robs a store.” Rather, the inflammatory meme is the result of some politically motivated Photoshopping — pretty convincing Photoshopping, but totally fake nonethless. St. Louis’s Riverfront Times reports that a photographer for the paper originally took the photo of protester Jarmell Hasson last month, when he was out holding a sign that read “no mother should have to fear for her son’s life every time he leaves home.” (Emphasis ours.) But an Imgur user, going by the handle Bdawgid, apparently grabbed the photo and edited the new, fake text in — a bit of fakery he admitted to on Imgur later. Unfortunately, that confession did not stop thousands of people from sharing the doctored image as real; on Facebook, one local posted it with the caption “You can’t make this up!!!!” Needless to say, you can (!!!!).
3. Posting a “privacy notice” to Facebook does absolutely nothing. In the latest round of a futile meme that repeats with every update to Facebook’s privacy policy, thousands of users have posted a so-called “privacy notice” that claims to protect their legal rights to everything they put on the site. (One representative version: ““I declare that my rights are attached to all my personal data, drawings, paintings, photos, texts etc. … published on my profile. For commercial use of the foregoing my written consent is required at all times.”)
Alas, all these privacy rebels are posting in vain: When you sign up for a Facebook account, you agree to a packet of privacy and data-use terms, and those are the ones that are officially binding. Making a status update after the fact doesn’t alter the terms of your original contract with Facebook, no matter the fancy-sounding legalese.
4. The author of “The Fault in Our Stars” is not the Zodiac Killer. This should be fairly obvious, given that the Zodiac Killer operated in the 1960s and ’70s — years before the 37-year-old author, John Green, was even born. The mathematics of the thing did not, however, dissuade tongue-in-cheek Tumblr-users from pointing out the (very approximate) resemblance between Green and a sketch artist’s portrayal of the serial murderer. From there, the meme made its way to Twitter and Wikipedia, where Green’s page briefly described him as “a serial killer who operated in Northern California.” The record has since been corrected, and moderators have locked down Green’s biography.5. The Koch brothers did not “buy NPR.” An image posted last week by Vocal Progressives — a Facebook page that manufactures “memes and other interactives for progressives and Democrats” — claims that Charles and David Koch, the divisive and deep-pocketed owners of Koch Industries, made a large donation to NPR shortly before the station slashed its coverage of climate change.
Virtually every clause in the proceeding statement is untrue: the Kochs have not donated to NPR, despite headlines to that effect, and NPR hasn’t stopped reporting on the environment; it’s just shifted the way it organizes reporters on those beats. (Snopes has much more on all that, if you’re intrigued.) This particular meme hasn’t circulated too widely — it has, of this writing, under 3,000 Facebook shares — but it’s an example of a genre that definitely gets around. When it comes to hyper-partisan Facebook meme-factories, on either side of the political spectrum, poster beware.
